This is highway robbery and nothing more than an excuse to cover their technical limitations in certain areas.

Without explicit notification to it's entire customer base, throttling is no different than a power company rotating blackout (or brownouts) and claiming that this was necessary to ensure the entire grid didn't go down.

But in this case, where no bandwidth restriction was in play before (except due to local traffic requirements), it is now quite clear that - very shortly - bandwidth will become the next great sales pitch and excuse for bad performance.

My website (as an example) is designed specifically to test these bandwidth limits. But then so is any HD download. And I suspect Apple will be at the forefront of solving or legislating bandwidth capability and user expectations as customers of Internet providers!